And I'll bet he gets 2-3-4 days per charge.

My dad has a really cheap smartphone that one day started to drain its battery (less than 12 hours per charge), a replacement battery did not help. He bought a new one, and because he still needs to transfer some stuff, he kept the old one and put it into flight mode, i.e. all radios (Bluetooth, WLAN, 2G/3G/3G) off. He occasionally uses it as an alarm clock, and easily gets three to four days per charge. Granted, an offline smartphone isn't that smart, and I expected more battery drain from the display or CPU-intensive apps, but this one drains the battery via one of the radios.

Perhaps I should try to scan it for malware, maybe there is something on it that tries phoning home all times.

Nokia brick

Yeah, my old Nokia 5130 brick needed one tank stop at the charger per week, and that's with a really tiny battery compared to modern smartphones. My Samsung GT-i8200N, still my first smartphone, is good for more than one day on a cheap aftermarket battery and with light use (i.e. one or two phone calls per day, 15 min or less surfing the web, reading five mails). Charging over night every night was something to be learned after the Nokia, but you get used to it.

I think it's like switching from a Otto or Diesel car to an electric car. You charge slowly whenever you don't need the car instead of doing a tank stop / high current charge when the tank / battery is empty.

A note on my phone usage: I don't really need a cell phone or a smartphone. It's mainly an emergency system, so that I can call for help from anywhere, and to be reachable for my family and a few important people. Occasionally, I use it as a camera, as a torch light, to take notes, play musik or look up something on Wikipedia or Google. But most times, I just carry it around like my keys or my swiss army knife. My main means of communication are my PC and my landline telephone.

Alexander